GOING “OVER THE TOP.”

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1822, 4 May 1918, Page 4

GOING “OVER THE TOP.”

WHAT A SOCIALIST THINKS. (By Private Victor Grayson, formerly Socialist M.P. for Colne Valley, now a member of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.) “What were your exact thoughts vvhen you ‘went over the top’ against the enemy?” This question was put to me by a military doctor who combined a taste for psychology with a skill in the healing of wounds. The question interested me, and owing to a long-practised habit of introspection, I was able to supply an answer to it. The answer was totally unlike anything the psychologist had ex-, pec.ted, but it was a faithful report of the uppermost, if not the only, thought in ray mind at that supreme moment. Going “over the top” is probably the most solemn and thrilling of the modern soldier’s many grim experiences; it is the culminating point of a sustained period of emotional stress. Everything in his previous military training has been but an arduous preparation for that moment’s crisis. And the contents of his mind at such a period must be considered as a sort of sacred deposition. The warning of “Stand to 1” is ominously whispered. In that brief space there is little time for any but purely sub-conscious sentimental thoughts. The enemy is in front, and the good soldier never under-estimates the power of his enemy’s possible resistance. A fleeting thought may be devoted to the loved ones who are vaguely waiting or watching behind; the soldier must see to it that the bolt of his rifle works easily in its groves; that his sights are clean; that the pins of his hand-grenades are in proper order —that he is ready in every detail for the exigencies of the impending trial. His destiny hangs on the hazard of a moment’s throw of the dice of Fate. Half an inch above the parapet . . . death is

frantically bargaining for him. The command conies to advance, and he scrambles out and over. At the edge of the “bags” some of his comrades stop, and silently fall back. He must watch the creeping curtain of his own side’s barrage, while the shrapnel moans and shrieks overhead, and the bullets of snipers and machine guns spit and splutter around him and at his feet. The protective curtain of his own artillery lifts, and the enemy’s trenches and pill-boxes appear in front.

’What arc the thoughts of this man? asks the psychologist. Before we advanced at Passchendaele wc had spout a night of unspeakable discomfort in a bog-bound field. Intermittent showers of rain bad drenched ,us to the skin, and the Boselic was so near us that wc dared not cough uor light a longedfor cigarette.

When the order came to “Standto!” I found that my valise, upon which 1 had been sitting, bad been submerged in the mud. With an effort I pulled it out, and strapped it 011 my back. With a crash like tho crack of doom our barrage began, and we started forward.

As the shrapnel mist began to rise I could perceive the tangled wire of the enemy lines tumbled in shattered heaps, and 1 realised that my increasing loneliness was being caused by the hidden lire from some concrete structures on my loft. The noise of artillery was deafening, the mud and water-logged shellholes made advance a work of art, and the bullets whistled past on every side.

I should have been very excited, and my mind should have risen to the occasion by moulding an epigram of patriotic purpose and British defiance. I am sorry to disappoint the psychologist, but the exact words which ran through my mind as I dodged the bullets and the shells were, “I’m very lucky to have one rissole and two slices of bacon in my valise. It’s not a bad war, after all!”